Today marks the anniversary of a day that changed my life.
On April 3, 2019, just like any other ordinary night, I spent the evening listening to a fight between my parents. As per usual, the screaming match persisted well into the early morning hours, but this fight was not like the many others before it. The night as a whole is a blur. I think I suppressed most of the details, however there is one crucial detail of that night that has remained plastered on the walls of my brain:
I watched as both my parents drove off in the back seats of separate sheriff cars. Both of them handcuffed, both of them drunk.
In the early hours of the morning of April 3, I went to sleep in my childhood home for the last time.
This story is not about that day in April.
This is about its antecedent and its aftermath.
As a young girl, my dad was not only my superhero – he was my best friend.
My dad is a father to two girls, and with my sister being both younger and much girlier than I was, this resulted in me filling the role as the son he never had. He used to take me and my sister to the golf course with his friends, and while she looked for dandelions or played in the sand traps, I would play golf with them.
I remember loving the days he would take me to work with him because it meant I got to use one of the empty offices as a play room while he was worked. He owned a car dealership at the time and every once in a while, I got to be in the local commercials with him and my uncle.
I didn’t have the kind of relationship most of my friends had with their moms, but that didn’t matter to me because of how close I was with my dad.
My dad and I did everything together from spending summers playing golf, to dancing to his favorite music on the way to school, to eating French toast on Saturday mornings. Everything was as perfect as perfect could be to a little girl. Although when you’re a kid, you don’t quite yet understand the concept of change.
2008: the recession hits. My parents tried to deal with it the best they could, but they were unable to stop the inevitable from happening.
In August of 2010, the dealership went bankrupt. My dad was forced to close the doors of the business he had spent his entire career building and working toward.
I was too young to understand it at the time, but my mom explained it as well as she could to an eight-year-old. She told me that what was happening to our family was going to be like what happened to Kit Kittredge. For those of you who don’t know, Kit Kittredge was an American Girl Doll book that I loved. Kit’s story took place when her dad lost his job during the Great Depression.
So, my understanding was that things were going to be hard for a while – but I didn’t understand was just how hard they would get.
Now don’t get me wrong, my dad has been a drinker since long before the dealership closed. I had his usual memorized well before my tenth birthday: dark Bacardi & diet Pepsi. When he still had his job, the drinking started at 5 o’clock when he got home from work, but things changed when he stopped going to work every day. My dad was newly unemployed with nothing but time on his hands. With nowhere to be on any given day, he’d happily pour his first drink at 3:00p.m…
After some time 3:00 slowly became 1:00…
and eventually 1:00 turned into 11:30.
Then one day before I knew it, 10a.m. was the new normal. One day out of the blue, I stopped wondering if he’d go back to how he used to be.
This change was not overnight, it was more of a long, grueling process over the course of a few years. He was actually still very functional for a long time after losing the business.
For about five or six years he was a stay-at-home Dad, and he seemed to like it. I know he wasn’t as happy as he was when he was working, but I was really glad to have my dad showing up to all my games and school events. It was a nice change of pace to get to see him all the time.
Looking back on it, I think staying so involved in our school is what kept him from diving off the deep end any sooner. For a while, he was our primary care-giver while my mom went back to work full time. It gave him something to do, a reason to wake up every day. Our relationship remained pretty solid throughout middle school, but the longer he went without a job, the harder it was for him to focus on anything other than drinking.
When I started high school, he became less and less involved and as a result, my dad became a morning drinker. My mom worked out of town, so my little sister and I still depended on him for transportation. I was thirteen as a freshman, so I still had a while to go before I could start driving myself… technically.
My high school golf team practiced at the golf course that was five minutes down the road from my house, so we developed a system: my dad would pick me up from school to bring me to practice, he would hang out at the bar and drink until we were done playing, then I would drive us home. As horrible as that may sound, I didn’t see anything wrong with what I was doing – keeping my dad from getting behind the wheel was my reality, my normal.
By my sophomore year, my dad only left the house to play golf or go to the store to buy more booze. He forgot my sister and I at school a few times, which was not a big deal to me. That didn’t bother me as much as when he’d pick us up after he’d had a few. It got bad enough that my mom had to get a job in town to make sure my sister and I got to and from school in one piece. At that point, I had given up all hope I had that he would become a functioning member of society again, much less get back the relationship with him that I lost in the process.
When I was a lot younger, I looked forward to mornings in my house because it meant sitting next to my dad at breakfast and getting a kiss on the cheek before school. As a teenager, I was lucky if he wasn’t still asleep on the living room floor when I came out of my room in the morning.
While my mom made her cup of coffee before heading to work, my dad would roll over into the puddle of last night’s rum he had spilled onto the carpet, and trudge over to the liquor cabinet to start his day.
He continued to deteriorate over the years, physically as much as mentally. He drank so much that rum became a meal substitute, causing his muscles to shrink and making him eerily skinny.
He and my mom had always fought, long before he was a drunk, but the fights got more vicious the longer he drank. They’d yell and curse at each other for hours, but the next day he wouldn’t remember a single detail.
I tried to hate him. He gave me every reason in the world, but the thought of cutting him out of my life seemed extreme. I didn’t think he could get any worse and soon enough, I was going to graduate from high school and move away from all the bullshit I had been putting up with for so long.
April 3, 2019 – two months before graduation.
I can only recall three or four days in my life that I felt as scared as I did that night. It wasn’t the first time a neighbor had called the police to come to our house during a fight, but it had never been this bad before. Most of the details blur together, but I remember thinking of my sister, how terrified she must have been.
She somehow managed to sleep through the whole thing. I went to check on her and she fallen asleep with her headphones on, keeping her from hearing all the yelling.
The next day after school, I saw my mom. She told me we would be going to the house to quickly pack a bag before my dad got out. My mom, my sister and I moved in with my cousins later that same night, where I would end up living for the next six months.
The next couple months were a shit show. Sharing a shoebox sized room with two other people isn’t exactly how you picture spending your last couple months of high school.
I could not understand how someone could get arrested, spend the night in a jail cell, and lose their family within 24 hours and STILL not wake up and realize what they’re doing wrong. I think spending the night in jail alone would have been rock bottom for me.
A few months later, my mom respected my choice to not move back into the house with her and my sister. I would be moving soon anyway, it didn’t make much sense. I was ready to leave my hometown, leave my dad and all that bottled up anger behind.
I also told my mom that I didn’t want him to come to my graduation ceremony, to which she responded “I’m not letting you do that, that is a decision you will regret later.” (She was right, as mothers are most times.)
I told myself I wouldn’t go back until he apologized and/or got sober. I wasn’t super optimistic about receiving either, so I figured getting both would be a stretch. After moving away to start college, I did go back for a few weekends and holidays, but I did my best to only go home for three to four days at a time to avoid having to deal with any family drama.
Unfortunately, the universe had something else in store for me, something I had absolutely no control over… in March of 2020. Go figure.
The pandemic cut my freshman year of college short, leaving me with nowhere to go but back to Red Bluff. To no surprise, I returned home to find my dad slumped on the living room floor, glass in hand and yet to be spilled. Home Sweet Shit Show.
However, I was very surprised to find out that since they moved back into the house last June (keep in mind – it is now March), my mom and my nearly fourteen-year-old sister had been sharing a room for ten. whole. months.
I’m aware of why they did it, neither of them wanted to be upstairs with my dad, but it wasn’t good for either of them to be in each others’ space.
I had been out of my dysfunctional disaster of a household for just long enough to get a grip on reality and recognize just how much I had been dealing up with for almost my entire life. It only took a couple weeks of being stuck at home with my dad in quarantine for my mom to realize just how much she had been putting up with, too.
People who grew up with or spend a lot of time around alcoholics get so used to how they act that they start to accept it as normal. My mom and I had fallen victim to this pattern after being so desensitized to my dad’s behavior. Something inside my mom changed shortly after I moved back home. I’m not sure what it was, but out of the blue, she decided she was done making excuses for him.
Tomorrow marks the anniversary of a day that changed my life.
On April 4, 2020, my dad was admitted to a rehabilitation facility, where he spent the next thirty days.
Tomorrow, my dad will have been sober for three years.
The transition from ignoring my dad’s existence to now talking to him on a regular basis was not an immediate change. Gradually over the last couple years, I have been lucky enough to get to know who he is as a person, not just as my dad.
Never in a million years would I have predicted how much he would change in such a short amount of time. Getting sober has obviously been really good for his health, his memory, and his overall function, but there is nothing like watching someone you love come out of a dark place and start to enjoy living again.
This past summer, I went back to my hometown and lived with him for the first time since he got out of rehab. I got to spend time getting to know him – listening to his stories about when he was younger, playing golf with him again, and mending a relationship that I thought was irreparable.
For the first time in almost eight years, I had my best friend back.
Before we were able to get back on good terms, I held onto so much anger. It took me a long time to forgive him for all of the things I was mad about, but it took me even longer to understand why he got to such a low point in the first place.
It would have been much easier for me to skip over most of the details and just say that my dad used to be a drunk and he’s not anymore – but that wouldn’t have been the whole story.
He didn’t wake up one day and decide to be an alcoholic. He lost his business, he became more and more depressed, and he fell victim to addiction. That doesn’t excuse him of his actions and he is at fault to a certain extent, but the issue is much deeper than choosing to pick up a bottle.
Alcoholism is so widely accepted in society, but the piece we don’t talk about is how 76 million Americans have been affected by alcoholism in their family. Although nearly 43% of our population has been directly impacted by this issue, we still don’t talk about it enough.
The reason I decided to share this piece of my life is not to get this off my chest, ask for pity, or air out my dad’s dirty laundry. The last thing I want is to make someone feel bad for me. I wouldn’t be who I am without going through everything that happened throughout my childhood. However, I know that addiction impacts so many people and as someone who grew up constantly surrounded by the effects of alcoholism, I know how difficult it can be to talk about and how isolating that can feel.
Addiction is a disease.
There is such a stigma around alcoholism and addiction, despite how common it is. I am in no way endorsing substance abuse, but it is a topic that needs to be talked about.
It took me a long time to understand that my dad was not acting that way because he didn’t love me anymore or because he became a horrible person. Addiction sneaks up on you while you’re just having fun and before you know it, it consumes you and becomes a habit that is nearly impossible to kick. I couldn’t quite grasp that idea when I was younger, but it gives me a better understanding as to why my dad drank as much as he did.
It is especially hard to separate an alcoholic between their sober persona and drunk persona; it’s like talking to two people that share one body. It’s hard to do, but it is possible to love the sober parts of someone and hate the drunk parts of them. Heavy drinkers don’t usually realize how much power they have to hurt others because they are just trying to get through life like everyone else. What starts out as an innocent distraction from reality can get really ugly if you’re not careful. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to get out of the hole they dug themselves into.
I am very lucky that my dad was one of the success stories. I am so extremely fortunate that he is happy and healthy, and I’m no longer afraid that he won’t live long enough to watch my sister and I grow up.
I don’t think he will ever understand how proud I am of him. Not only for getting sober, but for choosing to stay sober every day.
Happy three years of sobriety to my superhero and best friend. My dad.
All my love,
Your #1 Son, Kristin
love always, kristin 
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